TAYLOR, Texas (AP) - A Central Texas detention center that holds immigrant children and families could double in population.

A deal between Williamson County and federal officials would add up to 250 women and girls at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor.

Since opening in 2006, the former state prison has held immigrant families awaiting decisions in their immigration cases. The 512-bed facility has 250 people living there. The county’s agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could add up to 250 “noncriminal” immigrant females in a separate area. Read more »

It’s a shame that students on many campuses are unable to discuss racial issues because the chronically offended have assumed the role of Language Police. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, Donald Hindley, a political science professor at Brandeis University, used the term “wetback” in reference to illegal immigrants during a class discussion about racism. Despite the fact that Hindley criticized people who use the epithet, a group of thin-skinned students hoping to portray themselves as victims complained to the department chair. Brandeis administrators promptly found Hindley guilty of “harassment,” sent a moderator to his classroom to patrol his speech and ordered him to take re-education classes.

“I have decided to require you to attend anti-discrimination training,” Brandeis’ provost wrote to the professor who denounced the term “wetback.” “Your classes will continue to be monitored until I have determined that you are able to conduct yourself appropriately in the classroom.” Read more »

Some black criminal claims to have been assaulted and all of a sudden the police are wasting their resources searching for 2 guys who gave a ‘verbal assault’.   

While Fort Collins police were investigating a possible hate crime Saturday, they discovered the black man who was assaulted also had a warrant for his arrest.

The unidentified victim told police that shortly after 9 p.m. Saturday he was verbally harassed by two white men as he left a 7-Eleven Store at 505 S. Shields St. He told police he rode away on his bicycle, but the two white men followed in a car, forced him off the road, then physically assaulted him. One of the assailants was shouting racial slurs at the victim while they beat him, according to the police report. That would qualify the crime as a “bias-motivated assault,” said Fort Collins police spokeswoman Rita Davis. Read more »

WASHINGTON (AP) — A national Hispanic advocacy organization said Thursday it is fighting back against what it considers to be “hate speech” that has emerged from the debate over immigration.

National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguia announced plans to pressure television network executives and candidates seeking their parties’ presidential nominations to clamp down on such remarks.

The group launched a website to counter the speech, www.wecanstopthehate.org, with clips of what it considers offensive comments made on television, as well as a tracking of hate crimes.

Read more »

INDIANAPOLIS — Four suspects plotted to steal drugs from a house knowing the only adults inside were two women, who were gunned down along with the young children they held in their arms, according to court papers filed Tuesday.
Prosecutors also requested additional time to file formal charges against the four men arrested in the slaying. Read more »

Because the victim was black and the perp white, this crime is being called a hate crime and increases the chances of the death penalty.  When a group of blacks kills a white person, the same doesn’t apply.  Look at the examples of Knoxville, Wichita, and the daily murders of whites by blacks.

Prosecutors say the murder of an Omaha college student as she sat in her car outside a restaurant was racially motivated.

Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said Thursday that statements from Kyle Bormann when he was arrested and later show that race was a motive. The 21-year-old victim, Brittany Williams, is black; the 19-year-old Bormann is white.

Kleine said the murder charge against Bormann has been amended to include hate-crime information that could make the death penalty more likely, if Bormann were found guilty. Read more »

GENEVA - Swiss AIDS experts said Thursday that some people with HIV who meet strict conditions and are under treatment can safely have unprotected sex with non-infected partners.

The proposal astonished AIDS researchers in Europe and North America who have long argued that safe sex with a condom is the single most effective way of preventing the spread of the disease — apart from abstinence.

“Not only is (the Swiss proposal) dangerous, it’s misleading and it is not considering the implications of the biological facts involved with HIV transmission,” said Jay Levy, director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at the University of California in San Francisco. Read more »

LONDON - A small number of flu viruses resistant to Tamiflu, a top antiviral drug, have been detected in Europe, health authorities said this week.

Data from more than a dozen European countries show that Tamiflu doesn’t work in about 13 percent of H1N1 viruses, the main flu strain causing illness this year. Normally, resistance levels are well below 1 percent.

“It’s an unexpected finding and a signal worth watching,” said Fred Hayden, a flu expert at the World Health Organization. The resistant strains most likely emerged elsewhere, but were first identified in Europe. Read more »

BERLIN - An archaeological dig in downtown Berlin has uncovered evidence that the German capital is at least 45 years older than had previously been established, authorities said Wednesday.

During excavation work last week in the Mitte district, archaeologists uncovered a wooden beam from an ancient earthen cellar, said Karin Wagner of the city-state’s office for historical preservation.

It was in exceptionally good condition, having lain under the water table for centuries, and scientists were able to determine from a sample taken that it had been cut down in 1192. Read more »

German children forced to swallow guilt

BERLIN — Schulen in Berlin und Nordrhein-Westfalen [weitere Bundesländer folgen] versuchen es jetzt mit Comics!

Die Bildergeschichte “Die Suche”, gemalt vom niederländischen Zeichner Eric Huevel und bearbeitet vom Berliner Anne Frank Zentrum, erzählt die Gräuel Hitler Deutschlands in bunten Bildern.

Schüler aus 20 Klassen [13-16 Jahre] lesen ab morgen in Geschichtsunterricht die bewegende Geschichte von Esther, deren Eltern in KZ Auschwitz ermordet werden. CLICK ON COMIC IMAGE IN ARTICLE FOR MORE IMAGES

Last week, for the first time, the word “Nakata” appeared in the pages of Seattle’s Jewish community newspaper, The JT News. The paper (formerly known as The Jewish Transcript) was reporting the conviction of Rabbi Ephraim Schwartz. A little over a year ago, Schwartz accidentally drove his 1991 Oldsmobile wagon into Matthew “Tatsuo” Nakata as the 29-year-old Seattle City Council aide crossed a West Seattle intersection on his way to work. Nakata died soon after. With a jury’s verdict on Jan. 18, Rabbi Schwartz became the first person found guilty under a new law that allows the city to prosecute motorists who seriously hurt pedestrians—if the collision resulted from a traffic infraction of some kind.

The fact that the Schwartz case, which has been unfolding for months, went unmentioned in the Jewish paper until now maybe isn’t surprising. Every community tries to protect its own, and there’s an especially strong ethic in Judaism against any kind of public dishonor or criticism. More remarkable is that amid the tears, expressions of sympathy for Nakata’s family, and promises to appeal that followed the verdict, there was no mention—by the rabbi, his attorney, or his supporters—of any plans for him to, perhaps, stop driving.

Read more »

BERLIN - Members of a far-right German party boycotted a moment of silence at a state parliament held in honor of Nazi victims Wednesday, the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s elevation to German chancellor.

The six lawmakers of the far-right National Democratic Party from the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania refused to rise from their seats during a moment of silence.

Lawmakers from other parties said they were disgusted with the boycott, causing the parliamentary session to be temporarily interrupted. Read more »

PHILADELPHIA - A man who spent long hours each day playing video games was convicted Tuesday of killing his 17-month-old daughter when she pulled down his Xbox console.

Prosecutors believe Tyrone Spellman pummeled Alayiah Turman, cracking her skull several times, while her pregnant mother napped in another room in September 2006.

Jurors rejected arguments that Spellman confessed to protect the mother and convicted him of third-degree murder and child endangerment. He was acquitted of first-degree murder. He could be sentenced to about 23 to 47 years in prison. Read more »

Eight men who ran four area food markets are accused of abusing federal food programs for the needy at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1.5 million, newly unsealed charges allege.Federal officials announced the indictments and arrests yesterday, though six of the eight men were indicted on Jan. 10 and arrested Friday.

The indictments say that the owners and managers of two stores on the North Side and two on the West Side allowed their customers to use food stamps and WIC vouchers illegally. They permitted, authorities say, the exchange of the stamps and vouchers for cash and allowed people to use them to buy prepaid international phone cards and to pay off personal loans. Read more »

Berlin - A woman who restored a dilapidated synagogue, a man who set up a Jewish museum and another who started a Jewish genealogical database were among six Germans honored Wednesday for their efforts to preserve Jewish history. The annual Obermayer German Jewish History Awards — funded by Arthur Obermayer, a philanthropist from Boston and now in their eighth year — recognize efforts by ordinary Germans to keep alive their nation’s “rich Jewish cultural past.” Fritz Reuter, 78, established what is thought to be post-World War II’s first Jewish museum, Rashi House, in the southwestern city of Worms. He also founded a society that goes into schools to teach young Germans about the important role Jews played in prewar society. “That is our way of fighting against the far-right, using words and the spirit,” Reuter said. The recipients all receive an honorarium of an undisclosed sum intended to help them continue their work. More>>>

Umpires are livid that Major League Baseball has sent investigators to their hometowns, asking neighbors a series of questions that include whether the ump belongs to the Ku Klux Klan. “We did not anticipate that they would approach neighbors posing as a close colleague and friend of the umpire’s and asking them questions such as: Do you know if umpire ‘X’ is a member of the Ku Klux Klan? To try to link our umpires to the Ku Klux Klan is highly offensive. It is essentially defaming the umpires in their communities by conducting a very strange and poorly executed investigation. It resembles kind of secret police in some kind of despotic nation” said World Umpires Association spokesman Lamell McMorris. Tom Christopher, the Milwaukee-based supervisor of security and investigations in the commissioner’s office, had asked questions about Klan membership to neighbors of umpires Greg Gibson and Sam Holbrook, who reside in Kentucky. In addition, similar questions had been asked to neighbors of umpire Ron Kulpa, who lives in the St. Louis area. More>>>

Dozens of words in the German language, from “degenerate” to “final solution” have become taboo because of their use by the Nazis. A new dictionary of Third Reich terms provides a guide through the linguistic minefield.

As if German weren’t hard enough. Three genders, endlessly long words, verbs coming at the end of impossibly rambling sentences.

But there is another, more subtle, linguistic trap which both Germans and non-Germans can easily fall into — and which is far worse a faux pas than a mere slip of the article. Mention that you have found the “endlösung” [final solution] to a problem you’ve been grappling with, or that you’ve made a “selektion” [selection] from a number of alternatives, and you will quickly find yourself the target of disapproving stares. MORE>>>

TULSA, Okla. (Jan. 29) - Former NFL player Alonzo Spellman was arrested Tuesday after Tulsa police fired pepper-spray pellets into his car following a nearly 20-minute chase.
Spellman was booked into the Tulsa County Jail on complaints of eluding, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, resisting arrest and driving without a license, jail records show. His bond was set at $10,700 and Spellman remained jailed early Tuesday evening. Read more »

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Bisharo Iman hoped college in St. Cloud would be different than attending high school there - no more taunts of “Go back to your country” aimed at her Somali dress, no more being slammed into lockers. “I did get away from it - for a while,” said Iman, a junior business major at St. Cloud State University.

That was before a frightening six-week stretch in November and December when vandals carved or scrawled more than a dozen swastikas and other racist images on campus walls, elevators and bathroom stalls. The spate came as a setback to this central Minnesota university, which has spent more than $1 million, thousands of hours and untold energy in recent years trying to undo its reputation as hostile toward racial and ethnic minorities, an image so entrenched that some refer to the surrounding town as “White Cloud.”

“Do I groan and say, ‘Goodness, not again?’ Of course I do,” said Earl Potter, president of the school situated in a quiet, overwhelmingly white city of about 60,000 on the Mississippi River that has seen an influx of Somali immigrants. “But you have to look at our country, and how we still struggle with some of our more unfortunate legacies. These are complicated issues for everyone.” Read more »

 A quiet neighborhood in south St. Louis is shocked by what some are calling a “hate crime”. A homeowner’s garage was spray painted and nearly every window in his house was broken out. FOX 2’s John Gadson has more from the homeowner who believes three teenage girls are to blame.  VIDEO & MORE>>>

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth. Read more »

Security screening for arriving passengers has been stepped up yet again at American airports with the implementation of 10 finger fingerprint scans.

Last week, Logan airport, in Boston, became the third US airport to install the 10-finger scanners. Dulles airport, which serves Washington, DC, began using the devices in November and Atlanta airport began this month. By the end of the year, the devices will be installed at every international airport in the USA, as well as at seaports and border crossings. Read more »

This past weekend, Washington Post writer, Ellen Nakashimo scored a major scoop>>> on a classified directive, signed by president Bush, that authorizes a “cyber initiative” aimed at protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure against the growing threat of cyber attacks by foreign governments. The initiative is controversial because it places under control of the secretive National Security Agency the $6 billion in funds that the government is slated to spend on cybersecurity in 2008 SOURCE>>>

One of the first calls Sundeep Bhatia received Monday was from the principal at Dorsey High, a few blocks from his South Los Angeles 7-Eleven store.

Bhatia is the store owner I wrote about Saturday after his 7-Eleven was hit by a group of rowdy kids last week on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Bhatia was disgusted that the teenagers — most of them black — would act so disrespectfully on what he called a “sacred” day. Read more »

He gets 40 years for a murder for hire plot and firearm.
TAMPA - A federal jury didn’t believe Robert Covington when he testified at trial that wanting to hire someone to kill his ex-girlfriend was just a joke.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge James Whittemore told Covington that he didn’t believe lots of things the 36-year-old Tampa man said before, during or after his November trial. Read more »

BRATTLEBORO — Brattleboro residents will vote at town meeting on whether President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should be indicted and arrested for war crimes, perjury or obstruction of justice if they ever step foot in Vermont.
The Brattleboro Select Board voted 3-2 Friday to put the controversial item on the Town Meeting Day warning.
According to Town Clerk Annette Cappy, organizers of the Bush-Cheney issue gathered enough signatures, and it was up to the Select Board whether Brattleboro voters would consider the issue in March. Read more »

BERLIN — Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust. Read more »

NAIVASHA, Kenya - Some 2,000 people from rival tribes faced off on a main road on Monday in this previously quiet tourist town, divided only by a handful of police who fired into the air to force their retreat.

Some 130 miles away from the violence in Naivasha, in the city of Kisumu on the shore of Lake Victoria, rioting mobs torched houses and buses and blocked blood-spattered roadways.

Ethnic clashes sparked by a disputed presidential election a month ago have claimed the lives of 800 people, spreading into the fertile Rift Valley. The fighting began after President Mwai Kibaki’s Dec. 27 re-election, which international and local observers say was rigged. About 255,000 people have been forced from their homes. Read more »

OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada on Wednesday bowed out of the United Nation’s 2009 conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, saying it would likely “degenerate into … expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism.”

Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity Jason Kenney said that, to his knowledge, Canada was the first country to announce it would not take part in the 2009 Durban Review Conference.

The UN’s first World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in 2001 in the same South African city, “degenerated into open and divisive expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism” that prompted Israel and United States to abandon the meeting, said Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier. Read more »

Many of the region’s minority leaders say North Central Massachusetts still has a long way to go when it comes to giving minorities the same opportunities that whites already have.

“Racism is alive and well.” said Adrian L. Ford of Fitchburg, administrator for the North Central Massachusetts Minority Council. “Racism separates us and divides us and causes wasted talent and despair.”

Ford sees racial inequality as a major part of everyday life in North Central Massachusetts, despite the recent election victories of Gov. Deval Patrick and Fitchburg Mayor Lisa Wong. Read more »

CHILDREN as young as three are being taught anti-racism lessons as part of the first NSW Government-funded program designed to stamp out bigotry from a young age.

The program will be rolled out at a preschool in western NSW and youngsters will be given regular lessons in tolerance and multiculturalism.

The move comes as NSW councils investigate implementing a similar program across all council-funded daycare centres across the state. Read more »

NEW YORK - Authorities arrested a man they say had an arsenal in his apartment and was charged with spray-painting swastikas and spreading fliers reading “Kill All Jews” and “US hates you” around his Brooklyn neighborhood in September.

At a news conference on Sunday, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes said the man, Ivaylo Ivanov, had been indicted on more than 100 counts of criminal mischief as hate crimes and illegal possession of explosives and weapons.

Police and prosecutors said Ivanov spray-painted swastikas and spread the fliers in at least 23 locations — buildings, sidewalks and cars — targeting Jewish residents and synagogues in September in the tony neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. Read more »

DAYTON, Ohio - Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a woman accused of killing her 1-month-old daughter by burning the child in a microwave oven.

If convicted of aggravated murder, China Arnold, 27, could face the death penalty.

Police investigators believe Arnold killed 1-month-old Paris Talley by putting her in a microwave at her Dayton home in 2005. Coroner’s officials said the baby suffered high-heat internal injuries and had no external burns. They have ruled out scalding water, open flame or other possible causes of death that could have damaged the skin. Read more »

NEW YORK — Authorities arrested a man they say had an arsenal in his apartment and was charged with spray-painting swastikas and spreading fliers reading “Kill All Jews” and “US hates you” around his Brooklyn neighborhood in September.
At a news conference on Sunday, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes said the man, Ivaylo Ivanov, had been indicted on more than 100 counts of criminal mischief as hate crimes and illegal possession of explosives and weapons. Read more »

Good news these days is really rare, but it appears we have some coming from Arkansas. Arkansas authorities are starting to charge people that house or hire illegal aliens. A recent case has brought this to light when immigration agents raided the family business, Acambaro Mexican restaurants. Prosecutors are not only mounting a criminal case but also moving to seize the Reyes home and other properties that they call the fruits of the illegal labor the Reyeses allegedly used in their restaurants. Source>>>

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